3D Measurements are well known in the art and are widely used in the industry. The purpose is establishing the 3 coordinates of any desired point with respect to a reference point and coordinate system. As known in the prior art, these measurements can be accomplished with coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), teodolites, photogrammetry, laser triangulation methods, interferometry, and other contact and non-contact measurements. However all tend to be complex and expensive to implement in an industrial setting.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,431,290: “Portable photogrammetry system”, issued Feb. 14, 1984, provides a short-range hand-held photogrammetry system consisting of two cameras in rigidly fixed positions at the remote ends if a hollow bar. The system provides for simultaneous image capture.
A number of useful methods also exist as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 4,802,757: “System for determining the attitude of an airborne platform or the alike”, issued Feb. 7, 1989. That patent describes a system that employs digital image grayscale correlation in order to relatively position the moving image sensor at the times of the successive image captures.
However, applications of these systems and methods tend to be limited. Some are physically too large to be moved and easily applied, others require a lot of human intervention. Most require a relatively long data acquisition time where an object has to stand still. Furthermore, they are optimized for a specific object size. Thus, what is needed is a flexible, easily implemented system that can measure in a wide variety of industrial settings. A system performing measurements at sites radically varying by size and complexity, for example measurements in the construction industry as well as in continuous manufacturing processes, is needed.